


From the Forest Gone

by Pig_catapult



Category: Every Heart a Doorway - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-04-09
Packaged: 2018-09-19 14:10:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9444884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pig_catapult/pseuds/Pig_catapult
Summary: Five years before Nancy reappeared in her parents' basement, a girl who is not yet a demon found herself very, very lost in a world she hadn't seen since shortly after her birth there. With her parents unknown and her best chance of getting home dead or dying, Hellebore's case is quietly bounced from the FBI's Violent Crimes Against Children program to enrollment at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children. AU with the addition of OCs





	1. Leaving Home

“Father!” Hellebore cried out at the crackle of rusting metal through papered flesh behind her. She glanced back, but didn't dare slow down -- the Childsnatcher had just bought her time that would be unspeakable to waste. For the briefest moment, her eyes met with the dark glass marbles that made up half of the Childsnatcher's oval face, but then he turned back to the Forge and ripped his arm from its boilerplate teeth. He wouldn't survive that bite, not in the end; the Soul Forge was already hollowing out his very being. All Hellebore could do was clutch her skirts more tightly and run forward, dodging around the towering graves of Wolf Matrons past.   
A white light bloomed in the distance, far above and slightly to her right. She bit her lip. The Tower Bird inviting her could save her easily, if she could pay its price. So could the Wolf Matron, and for free, but reaching her in the heart of the Forest That Is a Mountain would be a much longer run. She might not make it. If she did, it would be by crossing through the regular haunts of the Ninth and the Six-Hundred-and-Thirty-Second, putting their souls in just as much danger as hers was in that moment.   
She veered right. Nothing a Tower Bird could fairly ask of her would be worth the risk of setting back the Wolf Matron more of her Pilfered Young than just herself. The Childsnatcher was already as bad as dead, and  _ much _ less easily replaced than Hellebore or any of her siblings. He shouldn't have saved her in the first place, and the Wolf Matron would be furious.   
The bright clearing around the canopy-piercing spire made Hellebore's skin crawl, and she pulled in her shadow for decency's sake as the direct light threatened to cast it. She took a deep breath, then forced herself to dart across the open space to the narrow gap in the wall that had been opened for her. It didn't close.   
“Ah, child who would be Bone Weaver, what brings you here at this time?” the Tower Bird asked her in a voice like creaking ligaments. The natural set of its jagged-toothed beak gave it the look of a permanent sneer.   
“You know what brings me here, Tower Bird.” Her already pale knuckles turned white against the dark of her skirts. She had thin patience for this sort of game at the best of times, and any time she spent talking to a Tower Bird was plainly excluded from being ‘the best’ of anything. “You shone your beacon for me because I am being pursued by a Soul Forge. What is your price?”

“What is your wish?” the Tower Bird countered.

Hellebore inhaled deeply. The terms themselves had come to her as reflexively as blinking when she’d first decided to veer right, but she wasn’t a demon, not yet. In the meantime, Hellebore was only entitled as many quibbles as she could utter in a single breath: “I wish to lose the Soul Forge’s trail without causing further danger, direct or indirect as far as can be foreseen, to anyone whose fate I or the Wolf Matron are concerned with, including myself.”

The Tower Bird’s beak opened in an awful rictus of a grin. “Give me your flower crown.”

Hellebore waited for the rest of the demand. It didn’t come. “And that’s the full price of my exchange?”

“If you find it disagreeable, you are free to leave my tower.” They could both feel the Soul Forge’s presence, heavy and closing in; she’d never make it, if she left now.

Hellebore swallowed, hesitated, and then slowly released her grip on her skirts, letting the tattered hems fall to brush the ground. “... I will accept your offer.”

Slowly, slowly she lifted the circle of gem-dark flowers and reddened-white bones from her head. One slate-blue leaf -- it would be dark, in the hazy red ambiance omnipresent outside -- caught a strand of her red hair, and she stopped to carefully disentangle it. She turned it around in her hands and paused to admire her work for one last time before she placed it on the head of the Tower Bird, taking great care not to disturb the crest of golden red feathers that crowned it already.

The Tower Bird cawed a laugh, then swept its shimmering dark wings together. A portal appeared at the summons, so blindingly bright that Hellebore had to shield her eyes from it. Alien noises reached them from the other side. “Walk through, and you will be delivered safely from the Soul Forge.

Hellebore had no choice. She squinted behind her arm, and forced herself to walk forward into the light.


	2. A Bright New World

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Alright, guys. There's gonna be gore in this one and dead bodies and involuntary psychiatric holds. I hope it's clear what's going on.

**Chapter 2**

The driver of the car had no time to brake -- indeed, had no time to register that he might  _ need _ to brake -- when the teenage girl appeared from thin air, bare inches in front of his speeding car. She tumbled across the hood, head crashing through his windshield as he reacted too late and began to spin out across the center line… and into oncoming traffic.

* * *

 

When the world seemed to be done assaulting her senses with spinning and crunching and cracking and  _ indemon screeches, _ Hellebore opened her eyes. She immediately regretted it; how did anywhere  _ ever _ got so bright? Where had all the  _ red _ gone? She tried again, squinting through her eyelashes at her new surroundings. She was in some kind of… enclosed  _ thing _ made of mostly fabric and leather, but there were pieces made of materials she didn’t recognize, not the least of which were the sharp clear shards that littered the interior below her and clung to her messy braid. Some object weighed down on her legs and hip, so she had to twist her neck and upper body to look behind her and see what smelled like brain.  _ Most _ of a human sat in an elaborate bent cushion, but the head and shoulders had fallen out an open hole in the caved-in wall, and been sheared against a tangle of dark-colored and unnatural branches on a dark backing. “ _ You _ can’t tell me anything…” Maybe whoever was still screaming would be able to tell her where she was.

If she wanted to find out, she’d have to get out of the oversized box, first. She started by moving one of her legs, but it almost immediately touched something very hot. Moving it the other direction made for a less comfortable, but acceptably warm position. She probed with one buckled shoe for purchase, then pushed. A sharp ripping sound told her that her skirt had caught on something near her thigh.

“Of all the -- Ohh,  _ a thousand grains of sand _ between your wretched teeth, Tower Bird!” She reached past the dead human to the tall back of the cushion next to his and started to pull herself towards the wider, cleaner space behind it. “A thousand.” Her petticoats slipped against each other. “Grains.” Her hips cleared the object on top of them, leaving her outer skirt and top petticoat behind. “Of!” Something crunched behind her barely a moment after she pulled in her legs. “SAND!”

She flopped onto the wide cushion and took a moment to rest, before sitting up to take inventory of her new bumps and bruises. There were light scratches with unsightly streaks of a dark, oily liquid smeared on her legs -- her left sock was completely ruined and she’d lost her right shoe -- and a few growing bruises where she’d been hit the hardest.. She ripped free what she could of her caught petticoat and overskirt, and used the rags to wipe the dark liquid away. After picking away enough glittering shards to feel her head without poking herself, she found just the expected tender bump. She had no injury that qualified for the Tower Bird’s idea of  _ danger, _ of course, but it had promised nothing about inconvenience.

Once again with her wits fully about her, Hellebore squinted out of the opening in the wall that still had unbroken clear stuff in it. The vast open space outside could only be described as alien. Straight lines and strange materials dominated the scene. Bright white light came out of a blue sky. People were shamelessly standing around with their shadows out for all to see. She couldn’t possibly go out there.

She’d known, of course, that the Tower Bird’s stated price had been too low; safety couldn’t be bought for a mere concrete possession. She’d  _ expected _ there to be bad circumstances on the other side of the portal, perhaps even that she’d be made to toil away her debt for another Tower Bird as part of a larger exchange she’d hadn’t been informed of, but she  _ never _ thought it would have made her leave the Forest That Is a Mountain entirely. The Tower Bird knew that the Wolf Matron could only could only complete her fate when her full Thousand Pilfered Young assembled before her. The Tower Bird had  _ been _ one!

The Childsnatcher was dying -- likely dead, if she could bear honesty with herself -- and he alone among the Fathers could reliably distinguish between different humans. That wouldn’t be a barrier to her return, if the Tower Bird hadn’t taken her flower crown; even the faceless Angelcatcher could find such an undisputed part of the Forest in another world immediately. But she wasn’t undisputed, not yet. She was still Pilfered.

Hellebore’s numbered fate couldn’t be reassigned while she still lived. She’d been sent anchorless to another world while replacement of the only demon who could easily find her was contingent on her having already been found. The sheer totality of the Tower Bird’s betrayal hit her with more force than any spinning box ever could, leaving her wheezing for each shaky breath. She hugged her knees, and the sound of her heart hammering away in her ears almost drowned out the high, whooping cries of an approaching creature that seemed to have all the breath in the world. The blurry world seen through her eyelashes blurred further.

What could she even do next? She didn’t know anyone here. She didn’t know how to get out of this strange box without navigating the clear sharp bits. It looked terrifying outside. The dead human’s muscles relaxed enough for him to soil himself, making for even less agreeable company. Agreeable company would have really helped.

It looked  _ terrifying _ outside.

When the whooping creature arrived, Hellebore had mostly remembered how to breathe, but, through her inaction, the choice of whether or when to leave the box was taken from her. A human pulled open the wall, somehow.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m… I want to go home.” Now that she said it, the tears escaped down her cheeks, and she couldn’t stop it. Freely answering questions like that should be dangerous, but the Tower Bird hadn’t sent her into  _ danger _ . “I don’t know where I am and I want to go home.”

“We’ll see what we can do about that,” the human said, keeping his voice calm and even, not hearing the hollowness of his words. “Are you hurt anywhere?”

Why would he want to  _ know _ that? “... My leg’s bruised, and I bumped my head. The rest is just scratches.”

“Do you know your name?”

“I’m the Nine-Hundred-and-Ninety-Ninth of the Wolf Matron’s Thousand Pilfered Young, but the Shepherd calls me Hellebore because it’s shorter.”

“Allllright, Hellebore, do you know how old you are?”

“... I don’t understand the question.”

“How many years old are you?”

“What’s a ‘year’?”

“Do you know today’s date?”

“No?” Who was Today, and what was a  _ date? _

“Day of the week?”

“Stop making up words!”

“Right.” Another human approached with some sort of rolling table that slanted up on one end. “Can you stand up?”

Hellebore’s breath caught mid-sniffle. “I don’t want to. It’s too open out there; how can you stand it?”

“It’s part of our job,” the first human said. “Will you come out if we give you a blanket? You won’t be outside for very long.”

She looked at the stinking corpse she shared the space with. What good would it do her to stay here? “... Okay.”

The humans bundled her up and strapped her to the rolling table -- so she wouldn’t fall off, they’d said -- and she saw the whooping creature for the first time. It wasn’t a creature at all, but another box like the one before, just bigger and squarer and with strange flashing lights. The inside was different, too, and one of the humans sat with her and tried to hold a conversation as the wall closed up again and the box with flashing lights started to move again.

“Is there anyone you want us to call?”

“Do you know how to summon the Fathers? The Wolf Matron never taught me how.” Hellebore’s knew before she asked that he couldn’t possibly; that knowledge was only given to those whose numbered fates would require it.

“I don’t think so. Who is the Wolf Matron?”

No-one had ever asked Hellebore that before.  _ Everyone _ knew who the Wolf Matron was. “She’s… she the Wolf Matron. She’s the soul and flesh of the Forest That Is a Mountain. There would be no trees without her.” There would never be new trees again, if she didn’t make it back.

“Okayy… um. Can you tell me about the Fathers?”

“They’re the ones who pick candidates for the Pilfered Young and bring them to the Wolf Matron to be tested. Mine is the Childsnatcher, and he’s… dying now.”

The human suddenly picked up a rectangular object and began making marks on it with an odd stick. “Was he back there in the accident?”

“No, and it wasn’t an accident. The Tower Bird did that on purpose.”

“Can you tell me about the Tower Bird?”

The conversation went on like that, until the box stopped and she was brought outside, then into a horrible bright place with horrible white walls everywhere, populated by humans in horrible white clothing. Everything was white, and everything was  _ wrong. She needed to get out. _

* * *

 

Apparently, this world had  _ rules _ regarding ‘unaccompanied minors’ who might have head injuries, and are assumed to be victim of a crime, scratching and biting people in an attempt to leave the hospital in what the humans were labeling a ‘psychotic break’. Something about being a danger to herself or others. Several humans in blue and dark  _ said _ they wanted to know all about the Forest That Is a Mountain, and the Childsnatcher, and the Wolf Matron, but none of them wanted to  _ listen. _

None of them, except for one human from the Efbee Eye, who introduced her to Miss Eleanor West.

**Author's Note:**

> You may notice that Hellebore's rainbow consists of four basic colors: White, red, blue, and "dark". Yellow, for example, is a hue of red to her, and black is just a very dark shade of dark.


End file.
